David Patrikarakos writes:

For centuries information was scarce. The math was simple: The higher up the societal food chain you were, the better the information you had. And it could be explosive. Information made Microsoft and it brought down Richard Nixon. It helped us navigate the globe and it feeds the Facebook algorithm. But what happens to society when information ceases to be scarce? This is the question Peter Pomerantsev explores in his finely written and deeply intelligent This is Not Propaganda.

Pomerantsev, a writer who also lectures on online propaganda at the London School of Economics, is well placed to provide an answer. Early on in the book he sets out the information dilemma facing us. More information, he argues, was supposed to mean more freedom to stand up to the powerful, but it’s also given them new ways to crush dissent. More information was supposed to mean a more informed debate, but it has led to more confrontation and enabled “new and more subtle forms of conflict and subversion.” For Pomerantsev the logical endpoint is both depressing and dangerous: “a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, fake news, deep fakes, brainwashing, trolls, ISIS, Putin, Trump.”

The book’s landscape is, accordingly, one of “Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, trolls, info-war charlatans” and “behavioral change” visionaries, and the reader is taken on a picaresque gallop through it. We meet, among others, a social media manipulator in Manila who helped get Rodrigo Duterte elected, a troll in St. Petersburg who peddled fake realities for the Russian state, and a Serbian expert on non-violent—and vertiginously humorous—protest. [Continue reading…]